Diehards

Caryl Churchill and Samuel Beckett on separation and suffering.

Let’s let Marlene, the diehard Thatcherite in Caryl Churchill’s 1982 play “Top Girls” (revived at the Biltmore, under the direction of James Macdonald), make the introductions to the imaginary dinner party she throws to congratulate herself on having been appointed managing director of a female employment agency—a fabulous feminist occasion that constitutes the first (and best) act of this daring and difficult British play. “This is Joan who was Pope in the ninth century, and Isabella Bird, the Victorian traveller, and Lady Nijo from Japan, Emperor’s concubine and Buddhist nun, thirteenth century . . . and Gret who was painted by Bruegel. Griselda’s in Boccaccio and Petrarch and Chaucer because of her extraordinary marriage,” Marlene (Elizabeth Marvel) says, adding, to the hovering waitress, “I’d like profiteroles because they’re disgusting.”

Where are we? What’s going on? Churchill’s unsettling mixture of myth, history, and modern day is an attempt to come to terms with the startling paradigm shifts of the early eighties, when British society was reeling both from the macho swagger of its first female Prime Minister and from her tough monetarist medicine—which, by the time “Top Girls” was written, had lowered inflation but doubled unemployment. “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul,” Thatcher said of her policy, in 1981. Here Churchill dissects the effect on Marlene’s soul of Thatcher’s infusion of American-style individualism into the welfare state. Marlene has travelled the breadth of America; she wholeheartedly embraces its virulent notion of liberty. “I support Reagan,” she says at one point. “I want to be free in a free world. . . . Anyone can do anything if they’ve got what it takes. . . . If they’re stupid or lazy or frightened, I’m not going to help them get a job, why should I?”

At her party, she gives away little about herself to her garrulous guests; however, her choice of companions links her to their sagas of female sacrifice and survival. The dining-table gossip over which she presides is a beautifully syncopated babble of regret and barbarity: abandonment, abuse, rape, murder, infanticide, grinding loneliness, and forced marriage all bubble up in the badinage. Pope Joan (the impressive Martha Plimpton) has the most amazing story to tell: masquerading as a boy in order to get educated, going to Rome, becoming Pope, being impregnated by a chamberlain, and then, along with her child, being stoned to death. But perhaps the most haunting observations come from the uncouth Dull Gret (the droll Ana Reeder), who speaks few words but all of them pungent. The other women may have been through hell, but Gret, in Bruegel’s painting, has taken up residence there. “There’s a big devil sat on a roof with a big hole in his arse and he’s scooping stuff out of it with a big ladle and it’s falling down on us, and it’s money, so a lot of the women stop and get some,” she says.

These sisters of sacrifice toast Marlene. Marlene raises her glass. “We’ve all come a long way,” she says. “To our courage and the way we changed our lives.” Only later do we realize that Marlene’s dream of empowerment is also a guilty fantasy of displacement. Like almost all the guests, she has had to give up a child—a subnormal lost soul called Angie (also played by Martha Plimpton), now a teen-ager, who has been reared by Marlene’s working-class sister, Joyce (Marisa Tomei, who doubles as Isabella Bird). Marlene’s success, we come to understand, has been won at the expense of others. The word “individualism” has a root in the Latin for “divisible.” “Top Girls” is a kind of crudely drawn map of Marlene’s division: from her co-workers, from society (“I don’t do good works”), from her parents, from her sister, from her daughter, whom she dismisses as “thick.” (“She’s not going to make it” is Marlene’s curt appraisal of Angie.) At the end of the play, when Marlene returns to her impoverished provincial roots, the audience sees both the wasteland that she has left behind and the waste that she has helped to create.

The de-rigueur face-off between Marlene and her sister, however—“I’m ashamed of you,” Joyce says. “Think of nothing but yourself”—is weakened for the audience by Tomei’s miserable accent. Over the years, onscreen and onstage, Tomei has proved herself a spirited and compelling player. Here she takes a bold run at the linguistic challenge, only to fall at the hurdle of the first vowel sound. As Isabella Bird, she is largely incomprehensible; as the exhausted Joyce, who cleans houses for a living, she is entirely unbelievable.

Nonetheless, the meaning if not the music of Churchill’s play comes through. While the blinkered Marlene sees a capitalist heaven ahead (“I think the eighties are going to be stupendous,” she tells Joyce, adding, “I’m going up, up, up”), Churchill sees only a social and spiritual hell. As I left the theatre, Marlene’s spectacular selfishness—she is a “top girl,” not a top woman—brought to mind Thomas Merton’s description of the individual: “I have what you have not. I am what you are not. I have taken what you have failed to take and I have seized what you could never get. Therefore you suffer and I am happy, you are despised and I am praised, you die and I live; you are nothing and I am something, and I am all the more something because you are nothing. And thus I spend my life admiring the distance between you and me.”

The notion of separation from others is given a gorgeous metaphysical shellac in Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame” (at the Brooklyn Academy of Music). “Absent always. It all happened without me,” says Hamm (John Turturro), who is blind, paralyzed, and wheelchair-bound but still insists on being at the center of his blighted universe. “Am I right in the center?” he asks his gimpy factotum, Clov (Max Casella). In this vaudeville of collapse, Hamm and Clov make out of existential anguish a hilarious double act:

CLOV: I can’t sit.

HAMM: True. And I can’t stand.

CLOV: So it is.

HAMM: Every man his specialty.

“Me—to play,” Hamm’s first words, announce Beckett’s vision: life is a perpetual game in which we manufacture a narrative out of nothingness. “What is there to keep me here?” Clov asks. “The dialogue,” Hamm answers, a genius retort in which Beckett both teases theatrical convention and establishes a radical new one. “Ah the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them!” Hamm says. In its giddy despair, “Endgame” excavates uncanny depths of poetic fury and fun. “Do you believe in the life to come?” Clov asks. Hamm replies, “Mine was always that.”

Beckett’s high art deconstructs the low comedians of an earlier era. (Buster Keaton, Bert Lahr, and the British clown Max Wall were some of the best emissaries of Beckett’s slapstick tragedy.) In their hubbub, clowns personify both vigor and the void; they offer a spectacle of failure on the move. Beckett made drama out of their subtext. “We’re not beginning to . . . to . . . mean something?” Hamm says. To which Clov replies, “Mean something! You and I, mean something! Ah that’s a good one!” The pratfall, in Beckett’s comedy, is both physical and philosophical. As Clov, the slight, agile Casella darts around the stage like a lame bug meeting Hamm’s countless demands. “I see . . . a multitude . . . in transports . . . of joy,” he says, looking out at the audience with his telescope. “That’s what I call a magnifier.”

Hamm’s first breath establishes him as a supremo of suffering. “Can there be misery—loftier than mine?” he says, yawning as he awakens to “a day like any other day.” “No doubt. Formerly. But now?” Hamm’s combination of grandiosity and grief plays to Turturro’s operatic bravado; in the course of the evening, however, Turturro loses some of Beckett’s sprightly tempo and, to my ears, veers a bit toward the portentous. (Once, in London, I spent an afternoon in Beckett’s company, watching him direct “Endgame.” He stood with his back to the actors, listening to the words and keeping time with the forefinger of his right hand.) But there’s nothing grave about the director Andrei Belgrader’s lively, lucid production, which is given traction by the expert support of Alvin Epstein as Nagg, Hamm’s “accursed progenitor,” and by Elaine Stritch as Nagg’s wife, Nell. Stritch’s particular skill set—panic, cruelty, bewilderment, and great timing—make her a natural Beckett player. “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” Nell says, a mordant line that is made more profound by the baggage that Stritch brings onstage with her.

“Old endgame lost of old, play and lose and have done with losing,” Hamm says. We leave him at a stalemate: motionless, abandoned, without apparent saviors or connection. And yet Clov stands poised on the threshold, bags packed, watching in silence. Out of this bleakness—somewhere between impasse and action, silence and hilarity—Beckett forged an uncompromising drama of disenchantment: a way to both show and tell us about the loneliness and the love we suffer. The vision is dark; the execution is magnificent; the result is clear-eyed and ultimately joyous. ♦

Sign up to get the best of The New Yorker delivered to your inbox every day